Rich Brown CD reviewed

I learned a new word a few days ago, thanks to Toronto bassist/bandleader and composer Rich Brown. That word is “abeng,” as in the title of Brown’s new disc, also as in an instrument made from a hollowed cow’s horn, which was used historically in Ghana and later in Jamaica by the escaped slaves known as Maroons and their descendants.

It’s natural then to think of Brown’s album as a kind of clarion call, and maybe even as an appeal to higher consciousness. Indeed, in his notes to the album Brown writes specifically of the abeng being needed today to show strength and unity in the face of racism.

There is an earthy, percussion-heavy title track, also called Chant of the Exiled, and tracks with lofty titles such as This Lotus Ascension and Parity Of Esteem. But above all, on this collection of eight of Brown’s instrumental pieces, there are righteous grooves, engrossing arrangements and ear-catching melodies (both composed and improvised).

To make Abeng, Brown went into the studio with some of Toronto’s finest players. His core collaborators include drummer Larnell Lewis and alto saxophonist Luis Deniz, while Chris Donnelly and Robi Botos split up the piano duties and Kelly Jefferson on tenor saxophone and trumpeter Kevin Turcotte make cameo appearances. Percussionist Rosendo Chendy Leon plays on Chant of the Exiled. (A slightly compacted version of the Abeng project — Brown, Lewis, Deniz, Turcotte and keyboardist Stan Fomin — plays tonight at 8:30 p.m. at the Lula Lounge in Toronto to celebrate Abeng‘s recent release.)

Abeng‘s finely detailed and highly charged music picks up where Brown’s previous group, Rinse The Algorithm, which also involved Lewis, Botos and Deniz, left off. The new album seems to me to have pushed the music a little further, and it’s front-loaded with some very strong material.

You couldn’t ask for a better opener than the compelling Mahismatish, which balances fierce grooving and a great deal of harmonic and melodic intrigue. Deniz and Jefferson go to town, splitting up the solo space.

Window Seat, which you can hear with a click below,

is hard-hitting and poignant at the same time. Deniz and Brown play the melody in unison (as can be heard elsewhere on the disc), and Botos gets his time to shine on Fender Rhodes.

On the floating piece This Lotus Ascension, after a spare but moving piano intro by Botos and the song’s spacious, unfurling melody, the music grows larger and more dramatic, with Deniz in the foreground.

The charging, surging tune The Etymology of Ouch allows Turcotte to step out with a gritty and smart solo before Lewis thrashes extra-musically over the tune’s pedal-point foundation.

With Parity Of Esteem, a flowing, touching ballad frames a more tense passage powered by Lewis and Donnelly’s piano. Achilles & The Tortoise is a distilled, punchy closer, with nice, measured turns by Donnelly, Deniz and Brown himself.

International audiences might not have heard last year’s Between Heaviness And Here, Brown’s special disc that proved that the world needed a balladic solo electric bass album. Maybe those listeners wouldn’t have had easy access to the Toronto-rooted Rinse The Algorithm. Perhaps they would only have caught Brown playing, and masterfully so, in the touring bands of alto saxophone star Rudresh Mahanthappa or Andy Milne’s Dapp Theory group.

Hopefully Abeng will make the kind of larger splash needed to show one and all that Brown, with his virtuosic playing and richly imaginative composing and arranging, is a leader with enthralling music under his own name to be reckoned with.

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